‘Girls’ season 2, episode 8 review: The sting of jealousy
After a few weeks of experimental “Girls” episodes that were in a word dividing, the show went back a bit to some of its earlier roots for Sunday night’s new episode: showing us stories that actually focused on more than one character, and on life in New York City.
What we had ultimately was a pretty interesting episode that really have us a much better understanding of why Hannah is the way that she is, and what she had to overcome to even be in her present-day position. It’s strange that we never really thought much about OCD as a possibility for her, but seeing her suffer from something like this certainly made a great deal of sense for the character to have been crippled by something like this at some point in time in order to explain the weird set of rules that she presently follows.
With that being said, her story was really not so interesting this episode in comparison to Marnie once again playing the role of Everyman / Everywoman on the show and getting insanely jealous and regretful when she realized that her ex Charlie had fallen into great success and money with a phone app that he actually created in order to keep himself from calling her and falling back into an old relationship. With that, and some encouragement from a soon-to-be-devastated Ray (who Shoshanna cheated on with a doorman while attending another party), she decided to embark on a singing career.
The real shining star of the episode, for the second straight time in which he has appeared, was Adam. Adam Driver is doing a fantastic job this season of painting the character with a slightly different brush, and helping to see how this guy really can function in everyday life. There is a sweetness about him and a need to be loved, but it was very clear that he failed to express it while with Hannah. His history is alcohol is proof that he can move on from mistakes, and it seems to be doing that when it comes to his new prospective relationship. As for whether or not this lasts, though … we still don’t have very high hopes.
Did you enjoy the conventional nature of this episode more than other recent ones, and are you happy that there are only two half-hours left? Be sure to share what you think below, and you can see even more from this episode by heading on over to the link here.
Photo: HBO